Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Welll, it's a bit disingenuous to call it "job stuff" since it's such an outside chance and it's not likely that I'll beat out 3,000 other people for one internship position, but I'm participating in Wizards of the Coast's Great Designer Search 3! Most likely my commitment there is going to come to an end tomorrow when I get axed in the multiple choice test qualifier, but at least for the moment I can say I'm working on it. :P

Anyway I added you to the referee list; no idea how that got overlooked earlier, sorry!

You're welcome for Venus, and thank you very much for Rica! It's kind of weird how I haven't acquired an aron already; I love the evolution line, and they're great in ASB.

That's an interesting idea for an ASB feature! I was kind of confused at first because I read "Safari Zone" and thought of the forum game here and thought for a second you were proposing some kind of crossover event, heh. I think it sounds like a solid idea, and my only questions would be the implemenation details, you mentioned like, do people get money in exchange for turning over their old pokémon? How much would the recaptured pokémon cost? Etc.

Why don't you make a thread in ASB Meta about it to see if there's general interest and get the details hammered out?

Haha, well, it looks like you've convinced yourself that you have some time to ref after all, job search and notwithstanding! ;) I hope you have fun with that and don't end up too stressed from the battles you've taken on. You're doing a great job so far! (And I hope you've found some time to work more on your art, too!) It does seem like it's never the right time to do those sorts of things, but when the future feels uncertain it's definitely extra-hard to commit.

Interesting that some places turned you down due to lack of engineering experience. That wasn't something I thought many technical writing jobs cared about! But yeah, I'm sure there are engineering jobs out there that will appeal. It's rought that there's no real way to tell if you're going to click with a place without actually signing on and accepting a position, at which point neither you or the company is going to be pleased about an immediate exit if it turns out things aren't working.

Yes, hopefully my bumming around the world will be a selling point! And also hopefully nobody figures out how much of that planning, organization, or research stuff I actually did. Too lazy for all those tricks!

It's true, moving into a different field than your major/experience is in is all about spin. I was actually talking to a guy at a hostel about job stuff, and he said that the only good thing about Trump's election was that it proved credentials mean nothing and you can be whatever you want to be, which is why he applied for and got a job as a sushi chef even though he had no idea how to make sushi. I asked him what he planned to do when he went back to the US, and he said he thought he could get a job in Hawaii with the Park Service as a tour guide. "Do you... know anything about Hawaii?" "Nope!"

Hahaha, yes, creating your own job would be the best! Except for the part where you're 100% responsible for your own self whenever anything goes wrong, heh. But at least I would prefer that to having to abide by other people's goals and priorities.

I've been in Thailand for the past couple weeks, so I did both Christmas and new year's here. Leaving for Cambodia at the end of the week. And hmm, good stories. To be honest I don't really have many, because I think the best stories are always ones where something disastrous happens but it ends up being kind of funny in hindsight, and I've actually been super-lucky throughout this trip; not even so much as missed a flight thus far, knock on wood (though I've done a couple "I have half an hour to make this connection" airport sprints).

I suppose something a little amusing that happened was that, a week or so before I was going to leave for Thailand, the New York Times site had a front-page article about snakes in Bangkok. "Well, that's great," I said to myself. "A massive python emerging from a toilet to bite me on the ass sure is a bizarrely specific fear that I had no idea that I had, but actually it turns out I'm completely terrified of that!" So I boarded my flight to Bangkok resolved to examine all toilets carefully before sitting down on them.

On my first day in the city I decided to visit a park near where I was staying, and no sooner had I sat down on a nice bench looking out on a pond than I spotted a reptilian head coming towards me through the water. I jumped up immediately. "I just got here!" I thought. "Not like this!"

But upon venturing closer to the edge of the water so I could see what was under the surface (as you do when a potentially very large snake is coming for you), it turned out it was just one of these losers swimming around:

Water monitors are pretty common in city parks, and it's weird to watch these four-foot lizards wandering around while everyone ignores them. So I got to enjoy my minor freak-out at encountering wildlife, and I haven't seen any actual snakes in the country at all. Like most of my stories, it's really "I thought something was going to happen" rather than "something actually happened."